Simple Solutions That Work!

I am going to write down some of the ideas that I have for new venture. Although right now these are just ideas but I hope that someday I will be able to fulfill them. If you happen to read this post and are interested, then just leave a comment. We can talk further. The world is full of surprises, who knows one of these ideas may clicked!

Idea #1 – Web 2.0 social networking site for cars

Ever bought a used car or took your car to a mechanic shop for repairs in your local area? For most of them the experience is quite frustrating and horrifying mostly because of information asymmetry and lack of proper knowledge about cars in general. Most of the time people feel that they have been cheated by the dealer or the mechanic and trust me most of time they have been.

The idea is to creating a social web-based community like the MySpace or Facebook, based on Web 2.0 principles, for car owners where they can discuss any topic related to cars like how to perform small repairs on your car by yourself, where and how to buy used car in your surrounding area, finding a reliable and honest car mechanic in your zip code, how to maintain cars in general, etc. The revenue generating model will be:

a) Ad programs like Google AdSense or Microsoft AdCenter which are for most of the Web 2.0 websites.

b) Also another option is to charge car dealers a minimal amount of fees if they want to have access to the customer database beyond a certain number of records. the idea is to give the basic service for free but charge a premium for additional services/features.

Idea #2 – Never loose your cell phone

Summary
Ever lost your cell phone while you are out in public places and public transportation? Imagine a device that will beep, when you are away from your cell phone by more than a specified distance. The idea is to have a small transmitter (almost invisible) attached on your cell phone which will emit radio signals and the owner of the cell phone will have another small/micro device which will act as a receiver for those radio signals. The receiver will beep/alert, if it detects that the cell phone is ‘x’ (which can be specified) meters away from the receiver. This way one will never loose his/her cell phone.

Detailed Description
It is estimated that by 2010 over 1 billion people will be using different kinds of hand held devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and next generation hand-held entertainment devices. Although the cost of these devices is getting lower day by day, the amount of information that we store on these devices is increasing at an exponential rate every day. Hence the data that you store on these devices is a lot more important than the cost of the cell phone or the PDA.

Just imagine that you are travelling in a train during rush-hour to your work located in San Francisco financial district from Foster City and you forgot your cell phone on the seat because you were in a hurry to catch a cab from the train stop. Probably the first thing that will come to your mind is that how can you retrieve all your data which may worth hundred of thousand of dollars. It could lead to a serious loss of your valuable time in order to get back all the data that you lost. In some case you will never be able to get back your data.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had something with us which would inform us that we have forgotten our cell phone, just a few seconds back? Due to advancement in technology, these days we can easily make a small transmitter (say with a dimension of 0.2cm x 0.2cm x .1cm) which can be attached on our cell phone or on any hand-held device. We will have a small receiver which we can either put it in our wallet or just stick it on our wrist-watch or perhaps just attach it on our ring in hand. The idea is that your receiver with you will alert you, say with a beep, as soon as you are 5 meters away from your cell phone. You can specify the distance, above which the receiver will beep to alert you. Moreover you can turn this alert feature off when you are at home or at office.

The best thing about this product is its multi-utility value i.e. it is not for a specific product. You can use it on your MP3 player like iPods, GPS system, satellite phones and even on your laptop. We already discussed that the markets for hand held is very big and still it has a lot of growth potential. With cell phones getting smaller and smaller in size and people’s life getting busier, I think loosing your cell phone will become much for common than what it is right now.
Hence I think that this product has a great chance of success, considering that the cost to manufacture something like this is very inexpensive these days.

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Kushal Koolwal works as an Operating Systems (OS) R&D Engineer at VersaLogic Corporation, an embedded systems manufacturer located in Eugene, Oregon. In his current position Mr. Koolwal works with different embedded operating systems such as Windows Embedded, Linux, VxWorks, QNX, etc. Kushal completed his bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering in 2004 in India. He then pursued a Master’s degree in Computer Science, which he received in 2006 followed by an MBA in 2008, both from the University of Oregon. Additionally, Kushal is a database/web developer using .NET technologies and blogs about Linux solutions and businesses in general. His hobbies are traveling, playing sports, dancing, etc.

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